Online Marketing Madness — Strategic Reads for January 2017

This is part of a regular series of PlusROI posts that provide a collection of links to useful marketing resources and actionable strategies to help you grow your business. Curated by Nevin Thompson (@NevinYYJ), Rian Bowden and Rob Cooper (@robertecooper).

The Best Moz Posts of 2016

Moz is one of the most highly-regarded and popular sources of news and up-to-date resources for online marketers, and their “best of 2016” article should not be missed.

Have You Been Affected By Facebook’s “Erroneous Metrics”?

In the final months of 2016 Facebook made four separate announcements about providing advertisers with “erroneous metrics” to measure the impact of their marketing activities.

Facebook’s miscalculations have big implications if you rely on Facebook for advertising and customer engagement. Without the accurate data, it’s impossible to really tell if your marketing efforts on Facebook are paying off.

On top of that, Facebook is frequently criticized for being secretive about how it calculates its metrics… or even which metrics were bogus and needed to be fixed.

However, Marketing Land has created a list of everything Facebook has admitted about its measurement errors. Check it and see if you have been affected.

Will You Soon Be Hiring Bots to Engage With Customers?

“Chat bots” are running amok on WeChat, a popular Chinese social network that’s sort of like Facebook.

On WeChat, chat bots, software programs designed to simulate conversation with human users, like, follow, and even comment on articles to inflate numbers on behalf of companies and scammers. In some cases, these chat bots even build real relationships with humans.

While Facebook doesn’t permit this sort of behavior, as artificial intelligence improves, the use of chat bots in marketing is inevitable.

So, what challenges and opportunities do chat bots present for online marketers?